The Effects of Problem-solving-based Puberty Group Counseling on Adolescent Girls’ Health Concerns

Among the different periods of human life, adolescence is one of the most important and valuable periods of each personchrs life and anxiety is very common in this period of development and can continue into adulthood. One of the concerns is health concern so it is the best time to target the efforts of preventive behavior during adolescence. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the effect of group-based puberty counseling on problem-solving health concerns of adolescent girls.

This study is an educational trial with a pre-test and post-test design that is performed on 60 female students aged 15-18 years in Tehran (30 in the experimental group and 30 in the control group) who meet the inclusion criteria and by sampling method. Two-stage cluster random sampling was performed. Data were collected using a questionnaire containing demographic information and a standard health concern questionnaire. The intervention was designed by group discussion during 6 sessions for the experimental group and after 2 months, information was collected from both groups and analyzed by chi-square, independent t-test and paired t-test.

This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Arak University of Medical Sciences (Code: IR.ARAKMU.REC.1397.262), and all participants have read and signed the informed consent.

 According to the results of the study, before the educational intervention in the experimental group, the mean scores of anxiety in: personal health were 3.90, sexual health was 3.77, communication was 3.83, emotional health was 5.43 and the total score of anxiety was 16.10. The intervention had changed to 2.53, 2.03, 2.97, 3.30 and 10.90, respectively. This change was significant in the areas of sexual health, emotional health and total anxiety score (P<0.005). Also, the experimental and control groups, after the educational intervention, had significant differences in the areas of personal health, emotional health and total anxiety score (P<0.005).
Conclusion The results of the intervention showed that group discussion can reduce the health concerns of adolescent girls.